


Face to Face

by RuinsPlume



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst, Book 5: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Cross-Generation Relationship, Dirty Talk, M/M, Marking, Nipple Play, Oral Sex, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rimming, Romance, Rough Sex, Sex Magic, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-08-28 18:06:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8456491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RuinsPlume/pseuds/RuinsPlume
Summary: Sirius really hadn’t meant for this to happen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> NB: Underage, crossgen (15/36; Harry is portrayed as sexually mature), PTSD, explicit consensual sex, including rough sex and bruising.
> 
> Thanks to digthewriter for the beta; any remaining errors are mine. Thanks to the mods for the fest, and to my anonymous prompter for such a juicy setup. In addition to the prompt, which asked for this particular situation and set of proclivities, I also drew inspiration from Teland’s amazing fic “Plenary.” A few character details from that story are incorporated here, and are intended as homage.

When the knock comes, Sirius tenses. An Azkaban tensing, his whole body gone rigid, as if clenched muscles could ward them off. He knows perfectly well that only Order members can find Grimmauld Place, but when the knock comes, he can’t help thinking _dementors_. And that the Fidelius Charm’s been breached, that Dumbledore is dead, and the Ministry has arrived to arrest him again.

The knocker bangs a second time, the serpent’s head falling hard against the brass plate.

Remus isn’t due back for at least a month, and wouldn’t knock in any case. No Order meetings have been scheduled. And it’s long past the days when Tonks or Kingsley or Dumbledore might drop in on Sirius to see how he’s getting on. Nowadays, how Sirius is getting on doesn’t change much, not anymore.

Wand out, he opens the door a crack.

It’s Harry. With the smell of the Knight Bus on him: cleaning spells and watery cocoa. Sirius crushes him in a hug before Harry’s even had a chance to put his bag down. Harry’s arms go around him in response, tightening as he presses his head against Sirius’s neck, and Sirius feels Harry’s magic twine around him like some kind of tropical plant: lush and growing. The ink in his tattoos swells in response, humming at the attention.

They hug; they keep hugging. Sirius is starving for touch. He knows he should let go of Harry and step back, but he doesn’t. Not yet. And Harry doesn’t either, but lets his bag fall to the rug behind Sirius and pushes his head into Sirius’ shoulder like he intends to keep it there forever.

“Glad to see me?” Sirius asks. 

“So glad.” Harry still doesn’t raise his head, and his voice comes out muffled. “Hogwarts is _awful_. Umbridge is a sadist, my scar hurts, everyone’s scared all the time, and then Mrs. Weasley’s sending us all chocolate eggs like everything’s lovely, and we’re supposed to be doing O.W.L.s, and I can’t—I just feel—” Harry raises his head and looks up at Sirius then, his eyes bright with something that makes Sirius’s chest ache. “Could I...Sirius, could I stay with you for the rest of Easter hols?”

“You never have to ask that,” Sirius says, letting go of Harry and turning away to hide what’s suddenly happening in his pants. “This is your place too.”

He stoops to pick up Harry’s bag. His arousal means nothing; he knows that. Since he got out of Azkaban it’s been like this: body and soul so desperate to make up for all the years of isolation that now he over-responds to even casual touch. As if he could replenish what can never be replenished, not after so much deprivation. He was just two days shy of his twenty-second birthday when he was arrested. He turned twenty-two in Azkaban.

Then twenty-three.

Then twenty-four.

Then twenty-five.

Then twenty-six.

Then twenty-seven.

Then twenty-eight.

Then twenty-nine.

Then thirty.

Then thirty-one.

Then thirty-two.

Then thirty-three.

Then he escaped and was Padfoot for nine months, during which time he turned thirty-four.

And in all those years, no one ever touched him.

Is it any wonder then, that now he gets hard the way he did at fifteen, at nearly any provocation? Or that he grabs people in bear hugs that go on far too long? That he still loses his temper too quickly, that he’s mercurial, impulsive? He’s not much different now than when he went to prison. But in the intervening years, other people’s expectations of him have changed. He’s supposed to be different now because he’s thirty-six. Which means that Sirius spends most of his time trapped in the gray walls of the chasm between who he is and who he ought to be. But when he’s hugging Harry, that chasm disappears and there is simply the feeling of being held by somebody who loves him.

Still clutching Harry’s bag, Sirius reaches out to hug him once more. Harry’s arms snake around Sirius’s waist and squeeze and the embrace begins all over again. And whoops, this time it’s Harry’s erection Sirius can feel against his thigh. At least one of them has a body that behaves appropriately for its age. Sirius lets go and steps away once again, wondering something that he’s wondered before about Harry. But then his thoughts are interrupted by a voice from the wall.

HALFBLOOD ABOMINATION MUGGLE FILTH IN ITS VEINS HOW DARE IT DISGRACE MY HALLWAY HOW DARE MY OFFSPRING DEIGN TO MINGLE WITH SUCH FOULNESS

“Your mum remembers me,” Harry says, grinning.

“Shall we adjourn, then?” 

Sirius offers his arm. Harry takes it, and they start down the hall. 

“D’you want the room you shared with Ron last time?” Sirius asks.

“Where are you sleeping?”

“Me?” Sirius stops just inside the doorway to the library. “Well—in Remus’s bedroom, actually. He’s not here.”

“But you’d sleep there even if he were,” Harry says, with a directness that is altogether new.

Sirius doesn’t hesitate. He’s been waiting for this. “ _Especially_ if he were,” he answers.

Harry lets out a sigh that sounds very much like relief. “Thanks,” he says.

“For what?”

“Not lying to me.”

Sirius sighs too, but sadly, and sits down on the sofa. “I’ve wanted to tell you for ages, Harry. And I’m sorry I haven’t. Remus is so much more circumspect than I am—”

“I’d noticed,” Harry puts in, with a dryness that is also new.

“—And he doesn’t like people knowing. I _did_ make him agree that if you asked, neither of us would lie about it.”

Harry flops down on the cushion beside Sirius and scowls. “Remus thought I’d _mind_? When I don’t mind he’s a _werewolf_?”

“But that’s just it. He doesn’t want to give people yet another reason to treat him like he’s contaminated. Or pity him, or fear him, or think he’s after their children. But I think he’ll be relieved that you know.”

“Especially since...” Harry stops and looks uncomfortable.

“Yes?”

Harry opens his mouth, closes it again, sighs. He shifts his legs around on the velvet sofa cushion, then draws his knees up under his chin.

“You can ask me anything, Harry. Or tell me anything,” Sirius says, and waits. He’s pretty sure he knows what’s coming.

But then it doesn’t, and instead of coming out to him, Harry changes the subject. “About where I’m sleeping,” he says, glancing toward his bag on the carpet. “Could I have a room near you? Instead of the one I had last time? This house—it’s a bit creepy, honestly.”

Sirius laughs. “More than a bit, I’d say. The room the girls had at Christmas is right next to Remus’s and mine. We’ll put you there. And that way, if things go bump in the night, or if your scar starts hurting, or anything like that, you’ll just pound on the wall and wake me.”

“I don’t want you thinking I’m such a kid that I’d be scared of...” Harry trails off again.

“It’s my job to protect you.” Sirius says it lightly—enough. But he means it as much as he’s ever meant anything. Harry sees that he does and something in his young face gives way a little. He almost looks as if he might cry. “Tell you what,” Sirius offers. “If things go bump in the night for _me_ —and I have Azkaban nightmares at least once a week, so they often do bump—then I’ll wake _you._ That’s fair, yeah?”

“Deal,” Harry says, and looks quite happy again.

But the bumps in the night that wake Sirius, although they come from Harry’s side of the wall, are not a summons. The sounds are muffled, accompanied by the creaking of an old bed frame and quick intakes of breath.

Sirius sits up in bed. He’s not dreaming: that’s _Harry_ he’s hearing. Harry wanking hard enough shake the bed? _Merlin_ —

And then another voice, a male voice, low: _“Yeah...”_

Another boy!

_“That’s it...yeah....Come on....”_

It must be Ron. Sirius can picture it perfectly, the two of them crowded right beside each other, tossing off together, Ron urging Harry on. Sirius hears Harry’s breath come faster, and then the breaths give way to moans until one long ragged sound pours out of Harry only to be suddenly cut off, as if he’s buried his head in a pillow to drown out the rest of his orgasm.

Harry and Ron! Sirius was right then, and Remus was wrong. And that so rarely happens that for a moment, Sirius is simply caught up in the thrill of _Got you, Moony!_ He would owl Remus right now if it weren’t forbidden. Oh, but this is _wonderful_. Harry will have Sirius, and Remus too, to answer all his questions, and teach him the special spellwork he needs to know, and he won’t ever have to feel that he’s the only one, and—and Sirius is stroking himself beneath the covers, bringing himself along for the ride as the creaking of the bed on the other side of the wall becomes audible again.

“ _Yeah, like that...._ ”

The voice sounds too deep for Ron’s, though. Unless, imagine Harry has fucked Ron’s throat, fucked it so hard Ron’s hoarse from it. Sirius lets that image wash over him as he strokes faster.

“ _Oh, fuck, yeah....”_

Ron with his cock in Harry’s mouth, Ron with his hands gripping Harry’s wild hair—Sirius cups himself with his other hand, cradling his balls as he strokes and pulls himself along with them.

“ _Oh...oh, fuck, YES—”_

A deep guttural cry from the other side of the wall, and Sirius comes too, as if they’re touching him, as if he’s the one with his fingers locked in Harry’s hair, Harry’s mouth around _his_ cock, Harry swallowing him down and Sirius not alone and _fuck_ , he shouldn’t be wanking to this. But he already has. And he _is_ alone. In a big bed, with a pale pool cooling on his stomach. 

He feels empty now, and cold. He cleans himself up and huddles beneath the blanket, resting his forehead against their shared wall. It smells of damp plaster traced with old family magic. Not at all comforting. Did Harry only want to stay with him so he’d have a place to shag Ron Weasley? Perhaps. When he and Moony were their age, they would have _killed_ for an understanding godfather with a spare room.

Sirius curls himself into a Padfoot-shaped ball. He’ll make them both breakfast in the morning; that will make him feel better. Harry and Ron will go another round in the morning, no doubt, and if Sirius times it right, he can come in after they’ve finished but before they’ve gotten up, and they’ll be all flushed from sex, embarrassed and utterly adorable. He won’t tease them, though. Or not much, anyway.

But when Sirius knocks on the door at eleven the next morning, carrying a tray with a pot of tea and three plates of eggs, he finds Harry alone in bed.

“Where’s Ron, then?”

Harry rubs a hand over his face and reaches for his glasses on the night stand. His hair is even more wild than usual, and though the sheet covers most of him, Sirius can’t help noticing that his chest is a man’s chest now, with spirals of dark hair petaling out around each nipple, and that his nipples are a dark shade of brownish purple—

“Ron?” Harry repeats. “At Hogwarts, last I knew.”

“ _Harry_.” Sirius shakes himself back to the conversation and gives Harry his best Cut-the-Bullshit look.

“What?”

“I sleep—or try to—right on the other side of that wall there, remember? And I’m not deaf.”

“Oh, Christ.”

Harry flops back on the bed and smushes the pillow over his head. Not unlike he did last night when he was shooting off, Sirius thinks. He sets down the tray and waits.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says from beneath the pillow.

“Take that thing off your head. I’m not going to scold you. I’m rather tickled, actually.”

Harry pulls away the pillow and hugs it to his chest instead, staring fixedly at the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t realize we were being...audible.”

“Next time cast an Imperturbable. It’s just good manners.”

Not that Sirius didn’t enjoy hearing them. But it _is_ good manners to cast, and it’s clearly going to be Sirius’s responsibility to teach Harry such niceties; no one else seems likely to take up this aspect of his education.

“I can’t cast silencing charms here,” Harry says. “I’m not of age.”

“Of course you can; this is a wizard’s house. The Ministry won’t know who cast it.”

Harry looks at him a moment. “Aw, you’re taking the piss,” he says finally, wiggling up to a sitting position again and pulling the sheet around his waist.

“Fucking hell, Harry, nobody tells you anything, do they? _Damn_ Dumbledore.”

“But I thought....”

Sirius sits down heavily on the mattress. 

“It’s parents, not the Ministry, who are supposed to keep their kids from doing underage magic. But _I’m_ not your parent, and I say you can bloody well do magic here.”

“I—but that’s fantastic. You—I— _Accio_ cup!”

The teacup obligingly flutters up from the breakfast tray and into Harry’s hand. Harry glances nervously toward the window.

“You won’t be getting a Ministry owl, I promise.”

“ _Accio_ plate of eggs! _Accio_ fork!”

“Harry?”

“Er, yeah, sorry. You were saying? This is going to be _great_ , Sirius—”

“I was _saying_ ,” Sirius continues, laying a hand on Harry’s sheeted knee to hold his attention, “that the next time you bring Ron round for a shag, cast a silencing charm so I can get some sleep, yeah? And don’t let him sneak off in the middle of the night, either. If you shag him here, I want him here for breakfast. I like the company.”

“Er, Sirius?” Harry’s eyes dart to the hand on his knee. “It...it wasn’t Ron.”

“Oh?” Sirius takes his hand away. “Then—?”

Harry sets the cup and plate aside and hugs his knees to his chest. “Could we drop it now? Before I completely die of embarrassment? I’d really really like that.”

And Sirius does drop it. They eat the eggs and toast, all three plates of it, and Harry talks nonstop about Quidditch with the distracted air of someone caught in a party conversation with a guest he’d really rather get away from. So when Sirius gets up to tend to Buckbeak, he doesn’t ask Harry to come along. And Harry spends the rest of the day in the library on the first floor, eating sweets and studying for his O.W.L.s.

Sirius leaves him alone. But his thoughts don’t. Who was Harry with then, if not Ron? Due to the Fidelius Charm, the possibilities are limited to the people who’ve been told of Grimmauld Place by Dumbledore. Fred or George, perhaps? He didn’t think the twins batted that way, but the voice he’d heard _did_ sound too low for Ron’s, and the twins’ voices are definitely lower. Aha—perhaps Harry was entertaining both Fred _and_ George? That would explain why he wouldn’t say who it was. Well. Sirius is impressed.

They eat dinner in the library, because Harry’s been eating in the library all day, and there’s really no good reason to go down to the kitchen and risk tangling with Kreacher. Harry has gone out for fish and chips, which they supplement with biscuits and marmalade and crisps and butterbeer and whisky, all from the larder, and all of which Harry _Accios_ up the stairs, looking delighted each time, like some eleven-year-old who’s just had his first Charms lesson.

They sit on the floor with their backs against the sofa, scattering crumbs on the carpet and setting their glasses on the three-hundred-year-old end tables without using coasters. Remus would have a fit if he saw some of the library’s oldest spell books scattered around on the carpet like this, facedown with their spines cracking, and a headless chocolate frog perched on top of a first edition of _Applied Transfiguration._ But Remus isn’t here.

They don't talk about Hogwarts and what Umbridge is doing; they don't speculate about where Dumbledore might be. They don't discuss how much danger Remus is in, on his assignment to infiltrate werewolf packs, or how much danger Harry's in whenever he's anywhere that isn't here—sitting right beside his godfather on the floor of the library at Grimmauld Place. Relaxed, happy, and safe for the first time since when? They don't discuss how long ago that might have been. But as they sit beside each other, eating ginger biscuits smeared with marmalade, Sirius thinks again of last night, of Harry having sex on the other side of the wall, and he resolves to broach _that_ subject, at least. Of the many forces swirling around Harry right now, Sirius can at least extend him some protection in that one. Especially since no one else is likely to provide any guidance whatsoever. It’s Sirius’s duty to try, at least. So he clears his throat and repeats his offer of the night before.

“Harry? I’m not prying, truly. But you _can_ ask me anything. About sex, about me and Remus, about spellwork to protect yourself—anything. As I recall, Hogwarts doesn’t exactly hand out pamphlets on the subject.”

Harry takes a long swig of his butterbeer. “It’s _all_ I think about.” He glances up briefly and gives Sirius a wry look. “When I’m not thinking about Voldemort torturing or killing people, that is. I—it makes me feel a little crazy, you know? I don’t mean the Voldemort stuff. I’m used to that. But the sex stuff—Sirius, I just want to do it _all the time_.”

Sirius reaches quickly for the tin of biscuits and rests it across his lap to hide the interest his prick is suddenly taking in this conversation. “‘All the time’ sounds about right,” he says. “You’re fifteen.”

“Almost sixteen. So I’ll grow out of it, you’re saying?”

“Not necessarily. I haven’t.”

“Do you...if you _haven’t_ grown out of it, does that mean you still...I mean, you don’t _look_ like you’re walking about _bothered_ all the time, you know?”

“By ‘bothered,’ I presume you mean, by a massive hard-on my every waking hour?”

_“Sirius!”_

Sirius laughs, and inside his trousers, his cock nudges the underside of the biscuit tin. “Well, I do go about like that a fair bit,” he admits. “Trying to make up for the time I lost in Azkaban, I suppose. Especially when I know Remus is on his way home.” _And especially when my godson asks about the state of my cock—because I told him he could._

Harry ducks his head and eats another marmalade-smeared biscuit. He’s shaving now, Sirius notes. There are crumbs caught on the stubble darkening his upper lip.

“Some of the stuff...” Harry breaks off, finishes chewing, and tries again. “The stuff I think about—sex stuff, I mean, I don’t think it’s too normal.”

Sirius considers. Should he press and ask for details? No, not yet; Harry looks a bit skittish around the eyes, which is unusual for him. “Don’t be too quick to decide what’s normal,” he says instead. “You’re just thinking, for one thing, not doing. And everyone _thinks_ , about all sorts of wild stuff.” He rests a hand on the edges of the open biscuit tin in his lap and presses it down into his groin just slightly. To take a bit of pressure off. “If you do decide you want to try some of what you’re thinking about, then do, and if you don’t like it, stop. But don’t let whatever you’ve learned about sex from the rest of the world—or from the bloody _Dursleys_ —poison your head.”

Harry still looks mightily uncomfortable.

“Is there something— _specific_ you wanted to ask me, then?”

“Er.” Harry doesn’t seem to be able to get any further.

“It’s all right.” Sirius pokes Harry’s calf with his toe. “It’s an open invitation. Ask whenever you’re ready.”

Harry reciprocates the poke with a barefoot kick to Sirius’s heel. Sirius seizes Harry’s foot and tickles the sole. Harry shrieks and lunges forward, breaking Sirius’s grip and reaching for his shoulders. The tin of biscuits goes flying as Sirius rolls out of Harry’s reach, but Harry is too quick—he throws himself fully across Sirius, landing on the carpet on the other side, and then twists around, dropping forward and pinning Sirius at right angles beneath his chest, which is broader and stronger than Sirius had imagined. Not that he’d been imagining it.

Harry beams down at him, tousled and grinning and not even out of breath.

“I’m very fast, you know,” he says.

“Like your dad.” It just pops out, and it’s true; getting pinned by James during a bout of roughhousing was just like this, James grinning down at him, proud and disheveled. Sirius was always underneath. Not because James was stronger, though he was, but because Sirius liked to lose. He’d be turned on from all the contact, yes, but especially from the pleasure of James’s weight on top of him, holding him down.

But this is Harry pressing down against him. And it’s _not_ quite like James, actually; Harry is lighter than James was, all muscle and not a trace of fat, and his gaze is less combative. Harry’s eyes are more earnest, more hopeful. And he’s anchored in a way James wasn’t; Harry’s weight flooding down through Sirius says _here_ , says _stay_.

It is the opposite of Azkaban, for Sirius to be pressed beneath someone he loves, someone gazing down on him with mischief in his green eyes, in his teabrown face, and the wild hair framing it so thick and animal and lush that Sirius must free one hand from beneath Harry’s arm, must reach up and smooth that dark hair back from his forehead. And then smooth it again. And then push his fingers through it.

Sirius feels Harry’s body tense under his hand. Though they’re at right angles to each other with only their chests touching, Sirius knows that Harry’s hard now as well. And he really hadn’t meant for this to happen—Harry right on top of him and both of them stiff in their pants. And Harry _looking_ at him. And Sirius looking back with the look people used to think he did on purpose. He mostly didn’t; it was just there, stealing over his face, the look that made other people want to touch him. And he _always_ wanted people to touch him, even before Azkaban. And Harry is touching him now, their chests pressed together and their eyes locked and Sirius had better do something fast before his hands wind up clutching Harry’s arse, before his tongue winds up inside Harry’s mouth.

He breaks the gaze by wrapping his arms around Harry’s back and squeezing as hard as he can. To keep him close while at the same time preventing him from doing something crazy, like throwing his hips over Sirius’s and grinding down.

Harry shudders in his arms. “Sirius—”

“Shh. Don’t talk, Harry. It’s all right.”

“You said I could ask you anything,” Harry says into the collar of Sirius’s shirt.

“Yeah—”

“Then I’m asking how it feels when I do _this_.” And Harry runs his tongue along the side of Sirius’s neck.

Merlin’s rogered _arse_.

“It feels good,” Sirius chokes out. No other answer is remotely possible—it feels fucking fantastic. He squeezes Harry even harder against him.

Harry flicks his tongue again and Sirius feels Harry’s magic soaking into him, pulsing through his bloodstream to his groin, his heart, his limbs. So green, such a wild, _vibrant_ green; so fresh, despite everything that’s happened to him, and vine-hungry for love.

Sirius is hungry too—starving, really. For something fresh and green, something ripe and sweet. He holds Harry in his arms and feels the lushness of his young magic twining all around, looking for cracks to send roots down into. And Sirius is full of cracks. Sirius is nothing but chinks and cracks and broken places. 

“And when I do this?” Harry asks, taking Sirius’s earlobe gently between his teeth.

Sirius’s response to that? He fucking _whimpers_. He is ensnared. What the hell is he supposed to do now? What would Remus do? _Remus_ would exercise his famous self-control. He would be kind but firm, telling Harry that he’s flattered but that this is completely inappropriate. That Harry is lovely and will find someone his own age very soon. Then Remus would get up and leave.

That is exactly what Remus would do. But what Sirius would do, apparently—because it’s what he _does_ do—is to cup Harry’s face in his hands and kiss him full on the mouth.

Harry’s lips are soft. So soft, opening to his. Opening into a moan as Sirius’s tongue slides in like home. Harry’s mouth tastes like his scent but more so, strong and green and hot and _Harry_ and the power of it, the sweetness of it, flares through Sirius like a spell. He can taste the bright tang of oranges from the marmalade at the edges of Harry’s mouth, feel the rough stubble of Harry’s upper lip on _his_ lips, snagging a bit against his mustache as Harry kisses him back, so hungry and wanting. And Sirius is wanting too, so hard so hard. And then Harry tightens his mouth around Sirius’s tongue and begins to suck.

He sucks like a man who does to a tongue the things he will do to a cock, drawing his mouth tight over its length, his lips pressing hard as he sucks, as he asks with his body for Sirius to tonguefuck his mouth. And Sirius does it, thrusting in and in and _fuck_ , this is _Harry_.

With a willpower he did not know he possessed, Sirius rolls both of them sideways on the carpet, rolling Harry off him. He scrambles to his knees among the scattered biscuits and curls over himself, over his cock and his heart and everything in him that is straining for _Harry_. For Harry’s magic that has already taken root inside him. For his bloody beautiful and sexy and brilliant and so ready _godson_.

Both of them are breathing hard.

“I’m sorry,” Harry says after a moment, still on the floor behind Sirius.

“Don’t be.” Sirius doesn’t dare look at him. “Don’t ever be sorry for what you want. But what you want isn’t me, you know.”

“It is.” He hears Harry sit up and shuffle over until he’s at Sirius’s back. “Sirius, I think about you a lot. Really a lot. Like when I’m....” Harry’s hand comes to rest on the back of Sirius’s neck. His fingers begins stroking up through Sirius’s hair, sending runners of magic down over his scalp. Around his throat. His prick. Devil’s snare. “Maybe I shouldn’t,” Harry says softly, “but I always do. I think about you touching me, and I know you want to, and I _want_ you to, you’ve no idea how—” 

“ _Harry_.” Sirius hunches further in on himself, dropping his head forward into his lap, but Harry’s hand comes with it, still tangled up in Sirius’s hair. Sirius will _not_ turn around and grab him, will _not_ throw him down on his back and devour him right on the library rug. He takes a breath, squeezing himself into himself, trying to compress his magic and his lust and his brokenness into as small a space as possible. “Harry. If you love me, do something for me now.” He hears Harry suck in a breath of arousal at the words and feels like an utter shit. “Go upstairs, Harry, and have a good wank and a shower, and—and we’ll keep to ourselves for the rest of the evening, yeah? We can talk again tomorrow.”

“No.”

Sirius looks up at that. “Harry,” he says desperately, “I remember what it’s like. Being fifteen and out of sorts because you like blokes, and being stuck at Hogwarts where you have to sneak around, and on top of that, a bloody war on the horizon, and you feel that if you could just be close to someone—close _and_ fucking your brains out—that you’d be safe and happy for a little while. Believe me, I know how you feel. I’ve been there.”

“No,” Harry says again. He crosses his arms defiantly over his chest, a sulky teenager with a rock-hard erection in his pants. “It’s not just that. You know it’s not.”

“I don’t know anything,” Sirius says. He’s losing this battle and both of them know it.

“And you can’t just send me out of the room. I’m not a kid.”

“If you were a kid, Harry, this wouldn’t be happening. Go now. Please.”

“No.”

“Then I’d better go myself.”

To Sirius’s own amazement as much as Harry’s, he stands up. Unsteadily, because everything in his body is screaming _stay hold taste fuck more._ But he is standing, he is walking to the door of the library, he is going through the door, his hand at his groin the second he’s over the threshold, taking the stairs two at a time and slamming into the bathroom, vanishing his clothes so fast it hurts as they come off him, and flicking on the shower and throwing himself into it and wanking fast and too hard under the water, feeling like he’s going to break apart.

Is this what it feels like to be Remus? Every month or maybe even all the fucking time? If Remus were here, this would not be happening. If Remus were here Sirius could go confess and then be punished and absolved. Because Remus has him on a lead so strong and fine there is nothing Sirius can’t bring him, nothing Remus won’t take. Including this. He’d confess and Remus would discipline him and then maybe it would be over. Purged.

But Remus is not here, and Sirius is tossing off thinking of Harry right here in the shower, sucking his tongue the way he did, Harry with Sirius’s prick in his hand, and Sirius showing him how to tighten his fist under the knob of his cock, how to slide the foreskin back and lightly thumb the slit, how to work him up until he’s shaking, until he drops to his knees in this shower and comes in the swirl of water pooling off his thighs. Sirius comes on his knees in the shower, head against the tiles, and nearly weeps because he feels so bad.

Not because of what’s just happened. Not because of who he’s wanking to. That’s just fantasizing; the real thing he stopped in time. No, what feels so awful is being alone in his body again. Not being touched, at all, anywhere. And no comfort he can find from his own hands.

He makes it to his room without seeing Harry. He slams the door shut and transforms; then Padfoot feels awful too, but is no longer certain why. He wants to go to Harry, but he knows he mustn’t; he’s supposed to stay here. Padfoot trots to the wardrobe and noses in among the smells: cedar and wool and Remus. Using his teeth, he tugs one of Remus’s jumpers from its hanger, but carefully, so as not to rip it, because he’s a good dog. He climbs onto the bed, worrying the pullover in his teeth before settling his muzzle atop the Remus smell.

Remus loves him, but Remus is not here, Remus is missing. And someone else is missing too; Harry is missing. Harry loves him and Harry is here but Harry is missing. Padfoot missing him. Padfoot wants to howl but something tells him he mustn’t. If he howls, Harry will come to him, and Harry mustn’t. It is confusing, impossibly confusing. The only thing certain is that the feeling inside Padfoot hurts like Azkaban and makes him whimper and tremble all over like a bad dream. He noses beneath the woolly hem of the Remus fabric and breathes it in, huffing a sigh.

After some while, the trembling in his body subsides. A longer while after that, he sleeps.

Sirius wouldn’t have heard it. But Padfoot does, waking with his ears pricked and his nose up. Someone else is in the house.

He transforms back, shaking out the dog mind and reaching for his wand. Sirius can’t hear anything with his human ears, but he knows: there’s someone else close by. He cracks the door of his bedroom open and feels the spell at once—the complete absence of sound, the round pushback of a Imperturbable’s silence. Harry’s cast all down the hall then, as well as in his bedroom. He’s in there with someone _again_.

Someone _not Sirius_.

Someone is doing to Harry the things Sirius refused to do because of some stupid code he’s not even sure he believes anymore, not if Harry is so ready to do all those things with someone else, someone else IN THE ORDER for fuck’s sake, and not even Ron, and it had better be Fred or George in there and not fucking Kingsley or Charlie or Bill or bloody hell, it had _fucking_ better not be Snape. It _can’t_ be Snape. NO. Harry is _Sirius’s—_ if he is anybody’s.

He has to know.

Wand out, he begins sweeping the airspace outside Harry’s door. The door is the most vulnerable area in an Imperturbable. He begins at the threshold, slowly sweeping up around the doorframe. Like all borders, it’s got to be porous somewhere. The air at the tip of his wand shifts and murmurs as the door gives up tiny traces of everyone who’s passed through it, magical snags and flares like scents unfurling. But the spell holds. Sirius sweeps, listens, sweeps. He could shift to Padfoot and sniff out who it is, perhaps. But just as he’s about to go put his wand back in his room and transform, a loose edge of the spell catches. Right above the doorknob. Sirius flicks his wand across it and a thin shower of yellow sparks falls from the doorframe, and then he can hear.

No words this time. Breathing, a whispered something, maybe. Sliding sounds of flesh on flesh. A faint moan. Who, who?

Then a single cry from Harry, high and sharp, and Sirius knows, as surely as if he were in the room, that someone has just shoved their cock inside his godson’s arse using only spit for lube.

He almost breaks down the door. Not with an _Alohomora_ ; with his fists.

Harry is moaning now, little moans breaking out in bursts in time with the rhythm of someone else’s body, someone else driving their cock into Harry and making him make that sound, somebody else with their fist in his hair, their hand on his hip, somebody else pounding into Harry, wrenching those sounds out of him, _his_ Harry, and who the fuck is it? Who is it hiding in silence but making Harry moan harder and higher and faster until it sounds like he’s almost crying? _Ahhh_ and _ohhh_ and _Fuck me_ Harry cries, and then he’s coming. Wailing and coming.

The sound claws through Sirius, breaking into his magic, unleashing his magic. Just to the right of the door, on the wall beside Sirius's head, the milky glass shade of an old wall sconce explodes, glass shards flying everywhere.

Enraged, Sirius hurls his wand down the stairs and shifts to Padfoot again. The hall smells come hot and overwhelming in his dog nose and tell of nothing but Sirius’s anger and unintentional magic. Padfoot bounds down the stairs after the wand, overshoots and skids past it. He tears into the library and, forgetting about the wand, leaps onto the sofa and rips one of the sofa cushions apart with his teeth. Snarling and tearing deep inside it, he scatters the stuffing all over the room.

He’s a bad dog; he’s nobody’s dog. Sirius transforms back and hurls an empty butterbeer bottle at the fireplace where it shatters against the grate. He sends another bottle hard after it. Then another, and then the Firewhisky bottle’s in his hand but he doesn’t throw that one. There’s still liquor in it, so he swallows as much of it as he can without choking, throws himself down on the ruined sofa and howls. Like a dog, though he’s a man.

He finishes the whisky and is disgusted to find that his tolerance is so high now that not only is he still awake, he can still think coherently. Should he order Harry back to school? Impossible—it would hurt Harry too much. However fucked up Sirius’s head may be, he knows with every cell in his body that sending Harry away from the place he’s been told he can call home would be unforgivable. Sirius would rather slit his own throat. Besides, sending Harry off won’t solve anything. Harry will go on fucking whoever it is he’s fucking—he’s Harry James Potter, he’ll find a way—but his trust in Sirius would be forever shattered.

No, they’ll have to work this out. They’ll have to talk. And Sirius will have to be much more of a grownup. So he rolls off the sofa and onto the floor. He _Accios_ his wand from out in the hallway and then uses that to _Accio_ another bottle of Ogden’s from the basement. Harry is acting like a man now; Sirius can’t be acting like a teenager in response. He lies amidst the wreckage on the floor thinking this, eating broken biscuits and drinking until he passes out.

~

“Sirius?”

He doesn’t have to open his eyes to know it’s morning, or to know what Harry’s seeing. He remembers all of it just fine. The ravaged sofa cushion, its white guts everywhere. The broken bottles in the fireplace. The overturned biscuit tin, carpet of crumbs. The empty bottle of Ogden’s. And Sirius flat on his back on the floor, looking and smelling like Mundungus Fletcher after a bad night.

“Harry, a favor,” he croaks, eyes still closed.

“What the hell happened in here? And why is there broken glass outside my room?”

“Harry. If you would kindly give me fifteen minutes. To make myself look just a bit more like someone I’m not entirely ashamed of. And then, I promise you, we’ll talk.”

“Okay,” Harry says. He sounds tired now. His footsteps retreat, down the hall and then up the stairs.

Sirius Scourgifies himself, takes a piss and cleans his teeth. He calls Kreacher, whom he hasn’t seen since Harry got here, and with a pop, the house elf appears beside him in the bathroom, bowing and muttering.

“Filthy dogs tearing up the furniture. The eldest son drunk as a lord, but no lord of this house. Consorting with fouled blood. Oh, it would kill my mistress—”

“Your mistress is already dead, Kreacher. Stop aping her and go clean up the mess. Please,” Sirius adds, thinking of Hermione.

“The half-breed catamite should cut its dirty feet on the glass, it should, rutting like an animal in my master’s old—”

“And _shut_ _up_ ,” Sirius growls, a command Kreacher obeys by Disapparating. 

He takes a shower and puts his trousers back on. He finds a less-filthy shirt hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Then he goes down to the kitchen. He isn’t hungry, but Harry will be starving. There aren’t any more eggs, so he makes four cheese sandwiches, grills two tomatoes, and plates the remains of a treacle tart he finds in the back of the fridge. He makes tea and drinks a bottle of milk, and by the time he knocks on Harry’s door he feels a little less destroyed.

Harry is sitting on his bed, which, Sirius notes with some surprise, has been freshly made.

“Kreacher was just here,” Harry says, following Sirius’s gaze. “He said you told him to do it.”

“I told him to clean up the mess,” Sirius says sourly. “Which in his mind—”

“—Includes my bed,” Harry finishes. He doesn’t seem particularly upset about any of this. But then, he doesn’t yet know that Sirius broke through his wards last night. 

“You gonna sit down?” Harry asks, a trace of sullenness creeping into his voice. “Or do I get my talking-to with you standing in the doorway?”

“I’m not here to give you a talking-to,” Sirius says. “Just to talk.” He puts the tray on the bedside table and sits down on the bed. At the foot of the bed. As far away from Harry as he can be and still be on the bed. Why did he ever think talking to Harry in his bedroom was a good idea? They should be downstairs in the kitchen, on opposite sides of the room.

“So, what _did_ happen last night?” Harry asks, reaching for a sandwich. “Did you try to wreck the place or what?”

“Padfoot did the sofa,” Sirius says. “The broken glass was all me. I was a little upset, apparently.”

“Because we kissed.”

“No. Because of what happened after that.”

“But nothing happened after that. You took a shower and went to bed, I heard you, and—oh, fuck.” Harry looks helplessly about the room. “What did I do wrong? I _cast_ the spell, Sirius, I promise I did. I cast _two_ of them, just to be sure you wouldn’t hear. I swear I cast.”

“I know you did,” Sirius says heavily. “Imperturbables. I felt them.”

“Then...they didn’t work?”

“No, they worked fine.” _Until I took them down_ _so I could listen to you crying for someone else’s cock up your arse._

“Then what’s the problem? Why are you angry at me?”

Sirius closes his eyes. “I’m not angry at you, Harry.”

“You bloody well are. You broke the glass around the gaslight right outside my door. You ripped up the sofa we were sitting on last night, and you broke all the butterbeer bottles, and from the look of it, you got stinking drunk. What would _you_ call that?”

Sirius rubs his forehead. “I’d call it a mess. I’m a mess, all right? You like to think I’m not, but I truly am. And I— _Merlin_ , Harry, just tell me who you were with last night. I _know_ you’re entitled to your privacy, and I wouldn’t ask, except you’re having it off while I’m right on the other side of this wall, and that’s difficult enough, Imperturbable or no. But not knowing who it is—and you sneaking him in and out of here like some kind of _spy_ —Harry, that feels—it feels _awful._ ”

As Sirius says it he realizes why. It feels like the first war. When Remus was always sneaking out and wouldn’t tell Sirius where he was going. When, because of that, Sirius and James decided Remus was the spy. When they began keeping their own Secrets in response. When Peter snuck into the middle of all that deception. Peter, with the biggest secret of them all. “Harry,” Sirius says, and he can hear the pleading in his voice, “please tell me: Who was with you last night?”

Harry picks at the duvet cover. “It wasn’t anyone you know.”

“Of course it was; there’s a Fidelius here. Look, I don’t _care_ who it is, if it’s Fred or George, or both of them, or...I don’t know, Tonks with a cock, _whoever_ , as long as it’s not bloody _Snape_ —but—but even if it was Snape, Harry, you’ve got to be honest with me. Because this sneaking around, and lying about who you’re with, is _not fucking working,_ all right? It feels like the last war all over again, with Voldemort strong, and Remus always gone, and—you _have_ to tell me the truth, Harry. Please.”

“I _am_ telling the truth,” Harry says hotly. “After you went to bed, last night and the night before, I got up again, okay? And I went out to a pub. You know, a gay one. And I brought someone back here. A different bloke each time. Happy now?”

“Please tell me,” Sirius says, his voice trembling, “that Dumbledore has not made you Secret Keeper.”

Harry shakes his head. “No. I—I figured out a way to get them in.”

“That’s not possible. The Fidelius Charm—”

“It _is_ possible. I did it.”

“Harry, this is—are you taking the piss?”

“I swear I’m not. You heard us in there, didn’t you?”

“Fuck, this is—bloody hell, this is a major problem. And I mean the fact that someone from outside got in, not the fact that you’re shagging strangers, which is also a problem, but first— _Merlin_. Tell me how you got them in here, Harry. _Now_.”

Harry drops his eyes. “We Side-Along Apparated. The blokes—they were older, both of them. Way more than seventeen. So they did the actual Apparition, but I did the destination. I figured out that you can split up the two functions if you’re, you know, er, mixing your magic enough with the other person’s when you Apparate. But I didn’t tell them where we were going, so there wasn’t any resistance from the Fidelius Charm. And the whole time they were here neither of them had any idea where they were.”

 _Godric’s blue balls_. Sirius feels like he might start shaking, like Padfoot shakes when he’s scared, like Sirius shakes when he’s angry. He grips his knees to steady himself.

“Let me get this straight,” he says. “For the past two nights you’ve pretended to go to bed, gotten up again, gone out to some dodgy spot down Knockturn, picked up a older wizard you didn’t know, stuck your tongue far enough down his throat to invent a new form of Side-Along Apparition, and then brought him back here to Grimmauld Place where the two of you went at each other without his ever knowing where he was?”

“Yeah. And he didn’t know who _I_ was either. I took my glasses off before I went into the pub, and I put concealer—that’s this stuff Muggles use on spots—over my scar. That was all I needed, because nobody knows what I really look like; they only know me by my scar and glasses.”

“So two complete strangers fucked the Boy Who Lived in Order Headquarters and then just got the hell out again, none the wiser?”

Eyes downcast, Harry nods.

“Harry—” Sirius is not even sure what he wants to say anymore. “Harry, you’re...” He’s not shaking now. It’s a different feeling swelling inside him. And then what comes out is _exactly_ what he wants to say, because it’s the bloody truth, and Harry should know it if he doesn’t already, and he should know it from Sirius. “Harry,” he says, “you’re a fucking brilliant wizard.”

Harry startles. Then he beams. 

“You’re also a bloody fool, and a terrible sneak. And a—and a Marauder.”

Beams like the fucking sun.

“And what I _ought_ to be telling you,” Sirius continues, “is that you’re lucky you didn’t splinch your prick off, and that you’re an utter arsehole for Apparating someone in here who’s not in the Order, and that many of the people you care most about—including Dumbledore, and the Weasleys, and Remus, and _me_ —are sacrificing a great deal for the secrecy of this operation. And if _you_ bring it crashing down on our heads just because you wanted some stranger’s cock up your arse, then if Voldemort doesn’t kill you, Harry, you’re going to wish he had.”

Harry’s expression has been steadily crumpling during this speech, and by the time Sirius has finished, he’s put his face in his hands.

“I’m sorry, Sirius.” It comes out a whisper. “I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I know I should have been.” Harry raises his head then and meets Sirius’s eyes. He looks young and lost and as if he might cry. “ _Please_ don’t tell anyone.”

“Promise me you won’t do it again.”

Instead of answering, Harry hunches over, hiding his face. Sirius sees with horror that his shoulders are shaking. He’s fucking crying.

“Oi, Harry. Look—I’m not trying to be harsh. I know you weren’t trying to put anyone in danger. But you did.”

Harry’s shoulders shake harder. He’s crying without making any sound at all, which is somehow worse than if he were simply bawling.

“Harry, I’m not upset with you, all right? But I _have_ to keep you safe. And it’s more than the matter of Order security. You can’t keep getting picked up by chickenhawks in dodgy pubs. You could get hurt. I mean physically.”

Harry raises his tear-streaked face. “Maybe I like getting hurt.”

That sends a shock through Sirius. His heart fists up into his throat, and then, damn it all, his cock rises up and follows. Sodding hell. He takes a deep breath. “That’s....yeah. Okay. That’s something. I—I understand that—that you like getting hurt. I mean I _really_ understand it. But I do it with _Remus._ With someone I trust, in other words, not just any old—”

“Well, lucky you.” Harry glares at him. “But not everybody _has_ a Remus, do they?”

“Harry, those blokes you’re picking up, they’ll hurt you in ways you don’t want to be hurt. Believe me. I’m not saying you shouldn’t want anything you want. But you’re in over your head. You don’t know how to take care of yourself—”

“Then show me. Be with me.”

“I’m your godfather, Harry—”

“Then _act_ like it.” A flush of color flares on Harry’s tearstained cheeks. “You say you have to keep me safe. You say it’s your job to protect me. Well _do_ it, then.” He leans across the bed toward Sirius until he’s so close that his breath comes warm on Sirius’s jaw. “Teach me,” he says softly in Sirius’s ear. “Show me. Do your job for once.”

Sirius closes his eyes. “Oh, Harry. It wouldn’t be just once.”

Feelings swirl around him. Harry’s desire and shame and pride. Sirius’s confusion and lust and so much— _so_ much old pain. He feels a sharp stab in his belly, and then the clenching in his chest that means he’s falling into Azkaban. Emotions all jumbled together, the intensity of feelings—that’s what draws dementors. He’s fogging out in a miasma of fear at their approach. Some part of his mind knows that there are no dementors at Grimmauld Place, but in the panic that is taking hold, his sense of where he is is beginning to slip. He is sinking into lostness and he needs something to hold onto, something good, before he loses his footing completely, but he is falling, where is he, he is falling down and down—

“Sirius—”

There is color and light and touch and warmth in his arms. There is Harry, holding him so hard, his heart pounding against Sirius’s chest, pounding him away from the falling, from the gray, the solitary, the dying.

“Sirius?”

“Yes. I’m...I’m all right, sweet Harry, I’m here.”

And he is. He gathers Harry to his chest like an armful of flowers.

Harry nuzzles into Sirius’s neck, butts Sirius’s jaw with the crown of his head. Sirius breathes in the smell of Harry’s hair and feels his own body again. He’s here, he’s safe. And Harry is in his arms. Sirius raises his head, nudges Harry’s head up too, and licks the drying tears from Harry’s cheeks. Harry closes his eyes and Sirius flicks his tongue across the closed eyelids, the matted eyelashes. Harry really is a flower; he is a whole field of flowers, all growing strong toward the light. Padfoot could run and roll in that field and be happy till the end of his days. Happy and endlessly flowering.

Harry moves his mouth to Sirius’s ear. Whisper of nectar, of honey, of wind. Whisper of _Sirius_ , whisper of _yes_. Harry moves his mouth to Sirius’s mouth. And then Sirius is inside all the flowers.

Everything alive and touching. Earth-held. Harry’s fingers slipping under his shirt, Sirius’s hands stroking the smooth skin of Harry’s stomach. His mouth drowning in sweetness, in skin. Neck and throat and then return to mouth. Shirts fumbled up, shirts coming off, and Harry moaning into him, _his_ Harry, Sirius’s fingers at Harry’s navel, his fingers in the trail of hair that leads down below his jeans, down to the unexplored sea. Down to the ancient warnings on old maps: _Here be monsters_. Here is where they are, in a place whose coordinates are unplottable. Two inky names bleeding into each other as Sirius’s fingers open Harry’s flies.

“Sirius, wait, I won’t last.” Harry wriggles free and slides from the bed to the floor, tripping a bit as he kneels between Sirius’s legs. Sirius begins opening his own trousers, but Harry pushes his hands away. “Let me. Please, I want to— _finally_.” And he does, fumbling in his haste and nervousness but getting the zip open. Sirius isn’t wearing pants underneath; his erect cock is right there. His balls are right there. Harry takes all of it into his hands like ripened fruit. Brings his nose close and breathes in. Then he wraps his hand around Sirius’s cock and slides the foreskin down and _Godric_ , the touch fills Sirius with so much need he thinks he might pass out.

Harry bites his lip and looks up. Eyes hot, his breathing high in his throat. Sirius nods, and Harry lowers his head, taking Sirius’s cock into his mouth.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh Harry. My Harry.” Harry sucks him and Sirius’s words come tumbling out. “Harry, sweet Harry, want you so much. Fucking _mine,_ you are; no one else’s—” Harry’s mouth sends wave after wave of pleasure through him until there is nowhere that is gray or empty or alone.

He rests his hands in Harry’s hair, not pushing him, not guiding him even, just being with him. And the words keep pouring out of him as Harry licks and sucks and tastes and moans. “Harry, you’ve always been mine, fuck, like this always, you, you—oh hell, _Harry_ —” 

Harry tightens his mouth around Sirius’s cock, finds a rhythm with his head. His hands come up to Sirius’s hips and grip them. Sirius shifts to the very edge of the mattress and fucks in deeper and Harry takes it, so tight around him, and then looking up at his godfather, his whole face flushed, lustblown. Unwound with desire, with love for _this_. Love for _him_. Sirius can see it, how much Harry wants him, that it _is_ him Harry wants. The knowledge flares inside him and unravels him just as intensely as the sensations in his cock. Because the way Harry wants Sirius is the same way Sirius wants Harry.

There is no going back now, and he does not want to go back, not ever. He presses his hands against Harry’s head to still him then, and lets it happen.

He comes. Harry swallows, letting it in. Wanting it, wanting more.

“Oh, my beautiful Harry. Look at you.” Sirius pulls him up off his knees and they tumble backward on the bed, Harry on top of him. He kisses Harry long and deep, tasting himself all over the inside of Harry’s mouth. He’s done it now, he’s crossed over. He’s sailed off the map and become a monster too, and that is where he belongs. In the sea of it. Sirius is shaking again, this time with relief.

On top of him, Harry’s laughing. _Laughing_ , this beautiful Harry, his chin rubbed pink from Sirius’s beard, glistening with saliva and sweat. He’s laughing and kissing Sirius again and shoving his hand between their bodies to palm himself, reaching through his white cotton pants, his opened jeans shoved down his hips.

“Let me,” Sirius says, kicking his trousers the rest of the way off and rolling them both onto their sides. “Take your clothes off, my Harry.”

Harry yanks his tee shirt over his head, wriggles out of his jeans and pants. His cock springs free, arching out of a thicket of pubic hair. Harry reaches for himself, but Sirius snatches Harry’s hand away and pushes him back on the bed, bringing both Harry’s wrists up to the pillow.

“We’ll get back to touching in a minute,” he says. “I want to tell you something first, all right?”

“O—okay.” Harry’s flushed and breathing raggedly in anticipation. “What?”

But Sirius doesn’t speak for a moment. He lets himself look for a moment. His eyes follow the line of black hair from Harry’s navel down to Harry’s oh Merlin _beautiful_ cock. Slightly curved against his thigh, naked and hard and thick, the shock of black hair at its base looking just as unruly as the hair on his head. His bollocks dark and tight with arousal. The almost-purple seam that leads down between the globes of his arse, down to—

Sirius raises his eyes to Harry’s face again. Harry is waiting; so still, so quiet. But when Sirius’s eyes find his, a little moan escapes his swollen mouth. A sound so sweet it makes Sirius grow half-hard again already, just to hear how Harry wants him.

But he has to tell him first. He tightens his grasp on Harry’s wrists and takes a breath. “Harry? I need to—to confess something, actually.”

Harry nods, waiting. Eyes green-dark with desire. Naked and waiting. Maybe Sirius could just—

No. He has to tell him. He leans down over Harry, breathes him in. “Last night I broke through your silencing charm,” he admits.

“You—” Harry’s face falls. “Christ, Sirius.”

“I shouldn’t have done it. It was...an invasion of sorts. I’m very sorry, Harry.”

Harry bites his lip. Arousal, confusion. And yes, anger. “Why did you, then? Especially after _you_ told me to cast it the first place.”

With his free hand, Sirius takes the bud of Harry’s right nipple between his fingers.

“Oh—” A little gasp escapes Harry’s lips.

“I wanted to know who was fucking you,” Sirius says. He pinches the nipple and gives a twist.

“You— _fuck,_ Sirius—”

“I broke through your wards. It took me a while to do it; you cast well. And then I stood there in the hall listening to you getting fucked. And I wanted it to be me fucking you.”

“Sirius—please—”

Sirius takes Harry’s other nipple between his thumb and forefinger, twisting and rolling the bud. Harry bites his lip but the gasp comes anyway, his face taut with hunger, his wrists pushing up against Sirius’s restraining hand.

“I wanted to be the one who was making you cry for a cock in your arse,” Sirius husks. “I heard you begging for it—whimpering and begging to be fucked, and I wanted you so much that my magic went off by itself. That’s how the lamp glass broke. I haven’t lost control like that since I was a kid, Harry. That’s how much I wanted you.” He pinches hard then, and Harry cries out.

“I was wishing it was you,” Harry says, breathless and writhing a little under Sirius’s hand. “Last night—I tried to pretend I was doing it with you.”

Sirius lets go of the nipple then. “Did it work?”

Harry exhales sharply and goes limp on the bed. “No,” he says. “That bloke, he didn’t—he wasn’t _anything_ like you. And of course, he didn’t _know_ me.”

Sirius spools his fingers through the swirl of Harry’s chest hair. “Or love you, Harry. I do.”

“I—Sirius. I’ve never said that. To anyone.”

“Don’t say it now. Not yet.” Sirius drops the lightest, softest kiss on Harry’s lips. “Do you forgive me?”

Harry nods.

“Do you want me to touch your cock now?”

“God, Sirius, _please_.”

“You want me tossing you off?”

“Yes. Fuck.”

“Holding you and stroking you and making you come in my hand?”

“Hurry up, or I’ll come before you _get_ there,” Harry growls.

“Watch me,” Sirius commands. He lets go of Harry’s wrists and slides both his hands down Harry’s raised arms, down over his collar bones. Down past Harry’s beautifully reddened nipples, down his ribs. Down his luscious stomach, and then Sirius’s thumbs are riding the trail of black hair below Harry’s navel. Harry’s cock pulses up from the foreskin, revealing a shiny rose-brown head.

Sirius’s hand closes around the shaft and Harry’s cock leaps at the touch, straining against Sirius’s palm. Harry groans and clutches Sirius’s shoulders as Sirius strokes once, twice, four times and then Harry’s coming, moaning and shooting all over Sirius’s hand, over his own lovely belly. Spilling as Sirius bends over him and takes Harry’s lower lip between his teeth and lets Harry’s groans fill his mouth as Harry’s cock spurts hot over his fingers.

Then he groans a final time and goes completely limp—cock, tongue, body. Sirius stretches out beside him and Harry rolls into his arms.

“I’m sorry I came so fast,” he mumbles, “I couldn’t—”

Sirius silences him with another kiss. “That was just the first time, Harry. I’ll make you come again in a bit, and then you’ll last.” He kisses Harry long and slow and sweet. Holds him naked against his naked self. Sirius runs his tongue along each of Harry’s teeth, learning him there, too, as he holds this good thing hard against him. This Harry. This trembling. This peeled and precious soul.

“Don’t let go of me,” Harry says.

“I won’t.”

“Hold on to me harder.”

Sirius wraps his arms all the way around Harry, pulls him full against his chest. Their cocks mash together in the stickiness on Harry’s stomach as Sirius throws one leg over both of Harry’s, slides his other leg beneath and vise-tightens his thighs. He can feel Harry’s heart pounding as he holds him, digging his fingers into Harry’s shoulders.

“Like that?”

“That’s good. Can you...harder?”

“I’ll bruise you if I hold you harder.”

“I know. I like that.”

“Do you?” Sirius sucks a kiss onto Harry’s neck.

“Yeah,” Harry groans, tipping his head back, giving his neck to be taken.

And Sirius does take him, his mouth tattooing its shape on Harry’s throat as he sucks. So hard against Harry’s delicious skin. When he pulls off, the mark is rosy purple, its ink of broken capillaries blooming just beneath the tea-colored surface of Harry’s skin.

Harry touches the spot with his finger and looks up at Sirius. “I like that so much,” he says huskily. “Do another, where I can see it.”

Sirius grabs him, latches his mouth around Harry’s left nipple. Tongues it hard, rolls it between his teeth, then spreads his lips wide around the nubbly areola, the dark whorl of chest hair rough against his lips. Sirius sucks and takes and marks as Harry moans beneath him, thrusting his hips. Harry’s skin in his mouth swells like Sirius’s tattoos, swells like their cocks are swelling against one another, trapped between their thighs. When Sirius pulls off this time he is panting. This mark is fainter, but lovely still, a dark circle of pink from which Harry’s nipple rises puffy and swollen and erect. Sirius flicks it lightly with the tip of his tongue and Harry cries out, a short high whimper that makes Sirius grind into him.

And then Harry’s laughing: “I’m getting hard again.” He reaches for himself, but Sirius stops his hand.

“May I do it?”

“God, yes.”

“Tell me,” Sirius says, pressing the palm of his hand against Harry’s cock, “about your first time with a boy. You _have_ been with boys your age?”

Harry nods.

“Tell me about it, then. Did you like it, your first time?”

“It was just—just a hand job. In the Quidditch changing rooms. But—yeah. It was brilliant.”

“I want to hear about it,” Sirius says. “How you touched each other. I’ll touch you the same way while you tell me, all right?”

Harry looks away. “I don’t—Sirius, I don’t think I can play this game.”

Sirius lets go of Harry’s cock and gently turns Harry’s head so he can see his eyes again.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For saying what you don’t want. I feel less monstrous knowing you won’t say yes to me when you don’t want to.”

“You’re not monstrous at all. I want to say yes to _you_. But not to—it’s that the boy I was with, he—Sirius, it was Cedric.”

“Oh, Harry. I’m sorry.”

Harry hides his face against Sirius’s chest. Sirius strokes his hair.

“It wasn’t like we were so close or anything,” Harry says indistinctly. “Or maybe it was. I mean, we never spent time together when we weren’t...you know. But it wasn’t like, just-do-it-and-don’t-look-at-each-other-after, either. We’d kiss, and laugh sometimes, and he was so bloody handsome, Sirius, and so nice to me, and we tried stuff together, and I—oh, hell—”

He takes a deep shuddering breath. Sirius strokes and strokes his hair.

“And Dudley knew,” Harry continues shakily. “He heard me in my sleep. After, I mean. I was crying Cedric’s name in my sleep, and he teased me about it.” Harry raises his head then. “That was what made me start sneaking out of Privet Drive. I just wanted to forget about Cedric, you know? I went to Muggle pubs and...other places, since I couldn’t get to Knockturn. Because I thought, I can’t DO this again, I can’t be with anyone I care about, because there’s going to be a war now, and if I get close with someone _else_ who ends up getting killed, I’ll—”

Harry breaks off again, lowering his face back against Sirius’s chest. Sirius feels the hot uneven breaths against his skin, and then the tiny wet burns of Harry’s tears.

“Harry, listen to me.” Sirius squeezes his shoulder. “In the last war, it was _not_ staying close to the person I loved that got your parents killed. You have to stay close. To your lovers and your friends. You have to have people you can be close _to_.” He kisses the top of Harry’s head. “It’s one of the only things I know for sure.”

Harry gulps and shudders.

“Sirius?”

“Yes.”

“Touch me again. Make me stop thinking about all this—I want to be _here_.”

“I know. Sweet Harry.” Sirius reaches down until his fingers find Harry’s balls. He cups them, feeling the wrinkled skin tighten in his hands as Harry’s cock thickens.

“Here with you,” says Harry. “ _Only_ you. Just make me feel _you_ , no one else.”

Sirius brushes Harry’s mouth with his lips, almost, almost-but-not-quite kissing him as he caresses, pulling gently on the hair curling from his sac. Harry shivers, bucking his hips and thrusting his head forward for the kiss.

“I want to touch you everywhere, Harry.”

“Yes—please—”

Sirius lets his fingers drift down along the ridgeline of Harry’s balls, down over the smooth skin of his perineum to the edge—to the softest furled edge—of the bud of his anus.

“Oh—oh fuck, that, yes—” Harry squirms down against Sirius’s finger, opening his legs, raising his knees.

“You like my finger there?”

“Yes—”

“On your sweet hole? Stroking you there?”

Harry makes a sound in the back of his throat, luscious and broken, as Sirius swirls the tip of his finger against the tight folds.

Then Harry reaches down and grabs his arscheeks and spreads himself open. And then it’s Sirius making sounds in his throat. 

“Oh, fuck. _God_ ric, Harry. Hold yourself like that. Open. I have to see you.” He scoots down between Harry’s knees. “Look at you. So perfect—you’ve got an arse like a fucking plum. Let me taste you, Harry.”

Harry raises his head. “Taste my—you want—no one’s ever—”

Sirius almost comes right then. “I’d be your first rim job?” He puts both hands over Harry’s, holds him holding himself open. His sweet little hole quivers, dark and purple as a bruise. “Then I’ll _beg_ you for it. Please, Harry. Please let me tongue your sweet hole.”

“Yes, already, if you like tha—ohhh—oh _yes_.”

Sirius flexes his tongue, giving Harry just the tip. Flick against the opening.

_Circling edges lick slit crease sweet salt._

Above him Harry’s moaning, breathy little gasps as Sirius licks and tastes and hums.

_Sweet folds plum flex sweet hole open._

The moaning becomes one long continuous sound as Harry slips his hands out from under Sirius’s and begins tossing himself off with one hand while he buries the other in Sirius’s hair. Sirius points his tongue and fucks Harry open, then works one finger in, licking and eating the sweetness of that most secret place, ripe and wet and never before tasted.

“Sirius, oh God oh God—” Harry trembles and gasps, and Sirius nibbles and sucks, alternating tongue and finger thrusts until Harry’s hole clenches hard around his tongue and he comes. Spasming _closed open closed open_ _closed_ he comes as Sirius tonguefucks him through his orgasm.

When Harry has slackened and grown still, Sirius raises his head. Harry looks dazed, completely wasted. Sirius licks up over Harry’s balls and into the soft hollow between his hip and thigh. Licks along his softened cock. Then licks his belly, tasting the thick tang of Harry’s come, fresh as spring sap. Harry heaves enormous breaths as Sirius cleans him like Padfoot would, licking and licking past the point that there’s anything left to clean. Licking until Sirius’s tongue reaches his ribs and Harry squeals, catching Sirius’s head and pushing him off.

“God, stop—I’m going to pass out,” Harry gasps. “That was—that was sodding brilliant. Oh my God.”

Sirius stretches out on top of him then. “Glad you liked it. Am I too heavy here?”

“On top of me? Never.” Harry huffs out a laugh that he seems too exhausted to continue. “You—Christ. That was—wow.”

“I’ve worn you out.” Sirius rolls off of Harry and nuzzles in beside him. His Harry, so limp and wet and clean.

“No...not worn out,” Harry says. “Not yet, anyway. Just...hmmm. Happy?”

“You’re not sure?”

“I am.” Harry grins, and Sirius feels the pulse of it then, his sureness, his happiness, between them.

“You should eat something, though. Another sandwich, yeah? And some water. _Aguamenti_.”

Sirius watches him eat and drink. The sandwich shakes a bit in Harry’s hand at first, and he spills water on his belly. He sets down the cup and runs tentative fingers over the bruise on his neck, then across his swollen nipple.

“You still like those?” Sirius asks.

Harry nods. “I like any kind of mark. A lot. I like having marks that aren’t _this_ one.” He jerks his head so that his hair falls back from his brow. “I can feel my magic better when I’m, you know, having sex. And then I look at the bruises later and it’s like they remind me that I can—that my body can—be strong, maybe? The marks remind me of that, and they’re sore when I touch them, and it feels—it just feels good.” He frowns. “That’s kind of sick, huh?”

“To want to feel good? To want to feel strong? That isn’t sick at all.”

“And also, when I have marks...” Harry ducks his head, suddenly shy. “They make me think of yours, of your tattoos.” Harry brings a hand to Sirius’s chest and runs his fingers tentatively over one of the runes. Sirius feels their dark lines swell beneath his fingers, hungry for this influx of new magic. His skin looks so pale beneath Harry’s hand; pale and white and old.

“I’ve _always_ wanted to touch these,” Harry says. “Ever since I first saw them.”

“They like you touching them.”

“They can like things?”

“Well, it’s me liking it. But they’ve got their own magic. The only protection I had.”

“Who gave them to you?”

“Did them myself,” Sirius says gruffly. “I had to. With sharp stones and soot and ancient spells that don’t need a wand. Oh,” he adds, when Harry looks surprised, “we Brits like our wands for everything, but wizards from other countries know other kinds of casting. Your grandmother, for example. Mrs. Potter never used a wand at all.”

Harry is silent.

“You’re thinking how much you missed, yeah?”

Harry shakes his head. “I _do_ think that sometimes, when you talk about them, but just now? I was actually thinking about what my dad’d do if...I mean, Christ, Sirius, is this...am I really fucked up? Are _we_?”

Sirius lies back on the pillow and holds open his arms. Harry scoots into them, laying his head on Sirius’s shoulder and throwing his leg across Sirius’s thigh. “So much is fucked up,” Sirius says slowly. “James and Lily dead at twenty-one, that’s fucked up. And me left to rot in Azkaban, and Moony thinking I’d betrayed them, that’s fucked up. And the way Moony suffers, that’s fucked, too. You losing Cedric. Fucking Wormtail. And all the pureblood mania, and Death Eaters on the rise and people disappearing, and Voldemort back— _that’s_ what’s truly fucked up. But you here in my arms, telling me you feel happy—”

“I do!”

“And I do too.” Sirius sighs and strokes Harry’s cheek. “That’s not fucked up. How could it be? But—yeah, I know. James.” 

“I mean, he’d kill you, right? Or both of us?”

Sirius searches a while before he finds the answer that feels true. “If James were alive,” he says, “you and I would both be completely different people. And neither of us would need the other in this way.”

“But I might still like blokes. I mean, suppose it weren’t you I was with. If my dad knew I liked blokes, would he...would he still...”

“Love you? Want you for his son? Oh, Harry, yes. I can tell you _exactly_ how James would’ve felt about that. He was my best friend; I know you know that, but he was my best friend even after we—even after I took up with Remus in fifth year. And if your dad were still alive—and I’m sure about this, Harry, as sure as I can ever be of anything—your dad would be bloody Gryffindor proud of you for being who you are.”

Harry doesn’t say anything. Sirius strokes his back and feels him breathing. He tries to open up the place inside himself where James lives on inside him, to let Harry’s magic spiral in and feel the truth of what that was for Sirius. He doesn’t know if he should say more or if it’s enough just to invite Harry in, let him wander undirected.

After a while Harry sighs, shifting so he can see Sirius’s face again. “That makes me feel better,” he says. “Lots better.” He reaches up and strokes Sirius’s beard, his neck, his chest. He rests his head on Sirius’s chest and sighs again. “When I first realized I liked boys, I didn’t know about you and Remus yet, obviously, and I thought, this is so awful—and then I thought, at least my parents are dead, so they’ll never have to know.”

“Oh, Harry, no. Godric, I should never have agreed to keeping you in the dark about me and Remus. I’m so sorry. But your parents would have been proud of you. Believe me.”

“My mum, too?”

“Lily was the best. And she’d have made a fuss over all your boyfriends...well, maybe not the ones who were _her_ age, but— _ow_ , Harry—”

“Thought you liked getting hurt?”

“Not like that, you git. I need that arm.”

Harry kisses the spot he’s punched.

“And then your mum and dad would have taken you by the hand and marched you straight around to me and Remus, and made sure we told you everything you needed to know to be a happily bent wizard. Which I fully intend to do, so that _will_ make Prongs and Lily happy—” Sirius pauses and wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. “How much that still hurts. It surprises me sometimes, even now.”

Harry squeezes Sirius’s hand. Sirius threads their fingers together and kisses Harry’s thumb.

“We can’t tell anyone we’re doing this,” Harry says suddenly.

“I hope that didn’t just occur to you.”

“Obviously not. I mean, I haven’t exactly been blabbing about sneaking off to Knockturn Alley.”

“But Harry—” Sirius sits up. “This is important. In the last war, everything went wrong when we started keeping secrets. Remus and I from Peter, and Remus from me, and James and I from Remus, and Peter from all of us. I think you’ve got to tell Ron and Hermione.”

“Oi, Sirius, I don’t fancy having _that_ conversation.”

“Hermione will guess anyway, won’t she? She doesn’t miss a trick. Better you should tell them. In the end they’ll say, ‘as long as you’re happy,’ right? Which you will be, as long as _they_ can keep it secret, and not let something slip—”

“—in front of Mr. and Mrs. Weasley,” Harry finishes.

“Molly’d _cas_ trate me.” Sirius winces. “With a rusty butter knife.”

“Ouch. What about Remus?”

“I tell Remus everything. Always. And he’s used to me by now, you know. It won’t change anything between us.”

“But won’t he...I mean, it’s _me_. He knew my parents.”

“So did I,” Sirius says ruefully.

“But you think Remus won’t be horrified?”

“Well...yes, he will be. But only superficially. You know what I mean by that?”

Harry thinks a moment. “You mean he’ll be horrified because...because everyone _else_ would be horrified if they knew. So he’s got to be horrified on their behalf.”

“Well-said, Harry-lad. But underneath Moony’s thin veneer of outrage at my total lack of propriety and decorum, is someone with an enormous capacity for understanding other people. Especially people he loves. Especially me. And from the depths of his love and concern for you—and they _are_ depths, Harry, Remus would do anything for you—”

“Except come out to me, apparently.”

“Don’t judge him, Harry. Especially not when...” Sirius sighs and trails off.

“When I’m fucking his lover,” Harry finishes.

Sirius is quiet a moment. He smooths Harry’s hair and watches as it pops right back up again. “Remus _will_ understand it. He knows you pretty well, Harry. And Moony’s possessive, but not jealous. You see the difference? As long as I’m still _his_ —and I _am_ his, Harry, always, just like I feel you’re mine, and I’m saying that now, because you are, I can’t pretend otherwise—”

“I want you to say it. I want to be yours, Sirius. I’ve always wanted it. I wanted you to—what you’ve always said. To take care of me. But like this.”

Sirius twines his legs around Harry, buries his face in Harry’s hair. “Yes. Like this. Just like this.” The scent of Harry fills his nose, as fresh as grass. Grass someone has shagged on, maybe, but sweet and green and so, so good. Sirius raises his head and looks into the green fields of Harry’s eyes. “I’m lucky, Harry. I never thought I’d say it again, but I am. I’m a lucky man. And sometimes I’m even happy.”

“I want to make you happy, too.”

“You already have. I’m happy right now. Happier than I’ve been in years.”

“But what can I—you know. Do. For you, I mean.” He runs his hand down Sirius’s chest.

“For me?” Sirius grins. “You ask what you can do for me? When I’ve already had my cock sucked this morning in a most spectacular fashion, and I’ve rimmed the most delightful arse I’ve ever tasted since I first got my tongue into Moony’s, and I’ve been overwhelmed in every way by the incomparable sweetness and brilliance of your person? We’ll get back to my cock eventually. Right now, we’re focusing on you. Which reminds me—I want to be sure you know a few things.”

“I know I’m getting hard for you again.”

“I mean things to keep yourself safe.”

“Do we have to talk about that now?”

“I _did_ promise to protect you. Remember? That was how you broke me down.”

“Was that even today?”

“This morning.”

“I feel like that was years ago. Sirius, I feel like I’ve been with you forever.”

“Because you’re mine. It’s like that, belonging to someone. It feels as if it’s always been that way. It was like that for me with Moony.”

Harry nods. “I feel like this is what I always wanted, to be here with you like this, maybe even when I didn’t know you, still some part of me wanted it. It just seems...right.” Harry slides his hands down over Sirius’s thighs and Sirius’s cock stiffens. Lurches, actually, toward Harry’s hand.

Sirius laughs and puts a hand over himself. “Wait, Harry. I want to show you this before I get carried away again. A spell. You know Lubrico?”

Harry nods.

“Has anyone ever cast it inside you?”

“Cast it _inside_ me? No.”

“May I?”

Harry’s eyes widen and he nods.

Sirius closes his eyes again and gathers Harry to him. Pulls Harry on top of him and holds him and feels the tendrils of their magic unfurling for each other, reaching out and tangling together as they kiss, as their cocks throb between them, as the weight of Harry’s body sinks down into his own. He reaches down for Harry’s plum of an arse, cups his hands over the fullness of him. Harry whimpers.

 _“Lubrico intimum_ ,” Sirius whispers against the fold of Harry’s ear, and a shaky moan of pleasure breaks from Harry’s throat as the spell blooms shimmer-slick inside him.

“That’s... Sirius, it’s...it’s _you_ in me! In the spell, I mean, it’s your magic. I can feel it.”

“It _is_ me, yes. It’s harder to cast that way, so most wizards cast on their fingers. But you’ll be ace at it. Now here’s the next one. Inside you again. _Protego Lues_.”

“ _Oh_. That’s...it’s sort of sparkly, isn’t it.”

“That’s what a properly cast protection charm feels like. If the caster does it poorly—which most wizards do, since it’s a shield charm—it feels more like a Scourgify.”

“Like...carbonated, sort of?”

“You’ve felt it, then. I’m relieved to hear that.”

Harry nods. “A few times.”

“And the other times?”

“A Muggle bloke...oh, never mind. Can we just—”

“We’ll get to shagging in a minute, I promise. But first I want to know if you’re keeping safe. Tell me about your Muggle bloke.”

Harry rolls off of Sirius and props himself up on one elbow. “Not _mine_. He just picked me up. In a...God, this is embarrassing. In a park.”

Sirius presses his fist hard against his mouth to keep from saying any of the hundred things crowding his tongue. “Go on,” he says stiffly.

“We did it in his hotel,” Harry continues. “He was traveling. But he was nice. He was my....” Harry looks away from Sirius then. “He was my first time. Fucking, I mean. He was nice about it, though, and he used a condom, that’s a Muggle thing you—”

“I know what a condom is, Harry.”

“Er, right. So when I left, he gave me a bunch. Of condoms, I mean. He told me to always be careful, and he said...he said he’d always remember me.”

“He jolly fucking well will,” Sirius growls. “How old were you last summer, _fourteen_?” He aims a kick at the wall. “What was his name?”

“He wouldn’t tell me. He said he could get arrested—”

“Too right, he could.” Sirius kicks the wall harder, and a piece of something behind the plaster falls with a muffled thud. “Oh, Harry, I’m ruining you.”

“Hey.” Harry reaches for Sirius’s foot. “Stop it, will you? I’m already ruined.”

Sirius closes his eyes. He could fall again, right now, down and down and cold and gray. “We’ve all failed you, Harry. And especially me.” His tattoos swell and shiver, knit a film of magic across his chest but it’s not enough. It never was enough. He’s still falling, the hell of it swallowing first his body, then his heart his mind his soul, sucking himself out of himself.

But then the magic turns warmer. Flares and connects, turns vibrant, green. Harry is rubbing his hands across Sirius’s chest, over his heart, over his nipples, and then his mouth is there. His tongue circles Sirius’s nipples, then licks along the slashes of the runes. He opens his mouth around the full moon that Sirius made of soot and darkness.

Sirius shivers, suspended between falling and somehow hanging on.

Then Harry turns the moon around with his tongue. Sirius feels his chest flooding with light. Flooding his heart. He shivers again, violently, and his eyes fly open.

Harry is looking down at him. “What _was_ that?” he asks.

“That was a powerful wizard named Harry James Potter using his magic to save a dying man.”

“Sirius! Don’t say that. Please don’t say that. It scares me.”

“I’m sorry.” Sirius breathes deep into the light inside him, the light Harry put there. A light like the light filtered through the trees in the forest, filtered through life and growth and green. “I’m sorry, Harry. I was feeling back in Azkaban. It happens. But I’m here now, and there’s nothing you need to save me from.”

“Except yourself.”

“That’s not on you, though, is it?” Sirius runs his hands down Harry’s chest. Unmarked, save for the bruise on the nipple, but with its own magic beneath the skin, just as surely as Sirius’s tattoos. “And Harry, you’re not ruined. That was Azkaban talking before. I couldn’t ruin you even if I tried. No one can. You’re the opposite of ruined—you’re perfect, and whole, and brilliant and lovely and good. Come close, now. Let me kiss away what scared you.”

Harry sighs against him. The kiss is long and slow. Both of them are hard again, erections rolling against each other, against their thighs, but there is time now. Their tongues play and slide and taste in the luxury of this easier desire. The kisses slip in and out of being smiles.

“And _now_ ,” Sirius says after a while, “talk to me. Tell me what you want.”

“You, of course.”

“Yes, but how? You said you think about me while you toss off. What did you imagine I was doing with you, while you were wanking that gorgeous prick of yours?”

“You? Doing?” Harry blinks up at him.

“Yes.” Sirius runs his palm down Harry’s naked thigh.

“We were—” Harry pauses.

“Go on. I know you want me to fuck you, Harry. And Godric, I want to. But I want to hear you say it. Tell me exactly what you want, how you’d like it. I want to make it good for you.”

Harry laughs in embarrassment. “I don’t—I don’t want to say it. I don’t know why I’m so— _now_ , all of a sudden—so shy.”

“It’s like that sometimes, asking for things. Sometimes you have to be warmed up. I’ll start then, yeah? Ask you about what I already know you like?”

“Oh, that’s—yeah, that’s hot. Yeah. Please.”

“You like sucking my cock?”

“Yes.” Harry’s eyes actually sparkle. But then he ducks his head, embarrassed.

“Look at me, Harry. Keep looking at me for this. You liked it when I marked you? Marked your nipple? Sucked it so hard it’ll be sore for days?”

“Fuck, yes.” His eyes dart away, but then Harry, good Harry, _his_ Harry, remembers, and brings his gaze right back to Sirius. His cheeks flush a little, as if the blood there wants Sirius too.

Sirius takes Harry’s nipple between his thumb and forefinger. “You like when I tweak this swollen rosy tit?”

Harry whimpers. Sirius’s cock jumps for the sound. “Ye—yeah. I like—I feel it—there?”

“In your cock.”

“Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“When—when you pinch me, I feel it in my cock, it—it tugs, oh _fuck,_ Sirius, _that_ —”

“You liked it when I rimmed your arse?”

“ _God._ That would be yes.”

“You’d like that again. Me tonguing you open. Or, no: you like to _hold_ yourself open for me. Showing me that lovely hole of yours.”

“I—” Harry’s whole face flushes. “Yes.”

“You liked my finger in your arse? Inside you?”

“ _Yes._ ”

“Tell me you want it.”

“I want—fuck.” Harry drops his eyes, raises them, tries again. “I want—Sirius, this is hard.”

“But it’s how you’ll get what you want. Learn to say it. Not for me. For _you_.”

I want—your finger in—inside me.”

“Good boy. Always say what you want, my sweet Harry. Until you get it. From me and every lover.”

“Just you, Sirius.”

Hearing Harry say it makes his heart hurt, with love and a fierce sense of possession. He slides one hand around Harry’s arse and squeezes.

“Tell me what you want again,” he whispers.

“I want...your fingers...in my hole.”

“Stroking inside you, making you come again like that? I can rub you so sweet, Harry.”

“Yes—and, and I want your cock, too, want you to fuck me, I always—I want—Oh, Christ, I—”

“Look at me, Harry, tell me.”

“I want to sit on your lap, that's what I couldn't say. While you hold me, and kiss me, and then I want--I want to ride your cock while you hold me, that’s what I wank to, Sirius, I’m facing you and riding you, and you’re holding me, holding me and fucking me—”

“Fuck, Harry, get _on_. Here, like this.” Sirius scoots to the edge of the mattress and plants both feet on the floor. He pulls his cock toward his belly as Harry climbs into his lap, knees on the mattress. His cock nuzzles against Sirius’s belly and Sirius feels his own prick leak in response.

Harry wraps his arms around Sirius’s neck. “I haven’t done it this way before,” he murmurs.

“I’ll make it so good for you, Harry.” He strokes Harry’s shoulders, kisses his neck, his jaw, his ear. 

“I haven’t even...I’ve never done it face to face.” He hides his head against Sirius’s shoulder. “But I...I want you to see me.”

“My sweet boy. My Harry. You’ve never had someone who _could_ see you. Beyond the scar and glasses.”

Harry trembles in his arms, all of his beautiful naked weight so heavy in Sirius’s lap. So alive in his arms. Sirius strokes his open palms down Harry’s back, feeling all the hairs on Harry’s skin burst up in a shiver at Sirius’s touch. He strokes over the ridge of Harry’s spine, the wings of his shoulder blades, the broad muscles between them. He cradles Harry’s face in his hand, kissing him slow and deep. Then he leans back, drawing the bed pillows beneath his head and shoulders. 

“Open yourself up for me,” Sirius murmurs. He watches Harry’s face as he does it, his eyes closing and his head tipping back as he reaches behind himself to finger his hole. He can see the moment when Harry breaches himself, when he moans and rocks his hips, working his fingers in. Sirius reaches around behind Harry and finds the back of Harry’s hand. He presses gently, encouraging Harry’s fingers deeper, and Harry moans again.

“Fuck me. I’m ready.”

Sirius reaches between them, wraps a hand around his own cock. He's so wet for this, precome all over the head of his cock. He strokes it down over his shaft and Harry’s hand joins him, Harry’s hand on his cock too, slick with the lube from his arse.

Raise yourself up now,” Sirius tells him. "We’ll go slow.”

Harry rises up on his knees. His legs trembling just a little. Sirius thumbs more lube over his cock and leans a little further back into the pillows so they can get the angle right. Then he moves his cock into position, the tip just brushing Harry’s hole.

He moves his other hand up to Harry’s hips to steady him. “When you’re ready,” he says softly. Harry looks down at Sirius then. Lashes fluttering on a blink and then his eyes wide and scared and wanting, so full of wanting that something inside Sirius catches and won’t let go. Catches and holds on to stay forever in the moment that is this one. The moment his cock is at the threshold of Harry’s body, about to be let in. 

Harry lets out a long shuddering breath and lowers himself down. He’s so tight, so tight around the head of Sirius’s cock _so hard stretch tight_ —and then _open_. Then soft moan giving way.

“Oh fuck, oh yes, oh god,” Harry moans. “Oh fuck, it’s this, oh fuck, oh this.”

Harry taking it, letting himself be taken. Giving himself over. To the fucking. Sinking all the way down until Sirius is deep in he’ll never get out, never stop, never ever let go.

Harry rocks his hips down as Sirius thrusts up to meet him. And then they’re rocking together, Sirius _fucking_ him, and Harry saying _yes_ , Harry saying _harder._ Sirius fucking the _yes,_ fucking the _harder_. He is inside Harry, inside a magic even stronger than his own, and it is so good to be inside him, to be safe inside him. To be held like this, held and trusted and needed and loved as it builds and builds, Harry moaning his name, holding him and moaning, “Fuck me, oh fuck me, Sirius...I love you.”

Tears start in Sirius’s eyes as he says, “Look at me, Harry.”

And Harry does, wild-open, and Sirius gazes back, shining and joyful and free. “This, Harry. Me fucking you. Loving you. Holding you on top of me. Watching you ride my cock so I can hold you while you come.”

“I—I—Oh fuck, oh yes—”

Sirius moves one hand from Harry’s hip so he can circle his fingers around Harry’s prick, hot and dry and throbbing. _Lubrico_ , Sirius thinks, his hand flooding with it. Harry’s cock surges into the slickness of Sirius’s palm.

“Oh—wank me—yeah—”

“Fucking love you, Harry. Love your hole, love feeling my cock in your hole, love fucking you. Love watching your face while I fuck you.”

They rock together, Harry on his knees, working himself on Sirius's cock, Sirius thrusting up to meet him. Small sounds escape from Harry's mouth, open, broken, sounds of pleasure tight with need.

“I’m so close—please, Sirius. More—”

Sirius reaches up and wraps his hands around Harry's sides, helping him ride, rock himself to completion. “Fucking my sweet boy. Holding my sweet boy. Come for me, my Harry, my love. Let me watch you come in my arms.”

And Harry does. With that sharp cry Sirius heard the nights before. High and long and sweet. And this time, no pillow muffles it, no glass breaks in anger. This time Harry’s cry goes on and on, breaking Sirius’s heart as the sound tears through it, Harry’s pleasure and release a living thing set free in Sirius. Padfoot, who is always inside Sirius too, gives a yip of joy, and Sirius comes, flooding hot and deep inside Harry’s drawn-out sound. Sirius’s magic flares all around them, as strong as Harry’s now, its wild purple streaming through the room, filling their bodies, joyful and joined. 

Sirius wakes to the weight of Harry still on top of him. It is glorious to wake in the darkness and not think, not even for a moment, that he’s back in Azkaban. Everything around him, everything he can smell, everything touching him and holding him is Harry. Harrysex, Harrymagic, Harrylove. Sweat and dried come and Harry’s hair in his mouth and Sirius is so happy. He’d forgotten what it feels like to be this happy. It fills him up like tears, like anger, like pain, that’s how full it is, but it’s happiness this time.

He lies awake in the darkness and feels the pressure and release of Harry’s chest against his own, Harry breathing in his sleep on top of Sirius. No nightmares. No crying out. No war. Nothing but this.

He must have fallen back asleep again, because next thing he knows the room is light, and Harry is nuzzling his neck. It’s late morning, judging by the light through the window. Somewhere outside, church bells are ringing—it’s Easter Sunday. Harry will have to go back to school this afternoon. He’ll have to leave Sirius alone and take the Knight bus back to Hogwarts. Back to a Hogwarts without Dumbledore, back to a castle under siege.

Perhaps, Sirius thinks, he can Apparate to the cave and stay there as Padfoot again. It’s no worse than being in alone in Grimmauld Place; better, in fact, to be in the wind and the dirt and the rocks. The rocks are a bit too much like Azkaban, it’s true, but there is a promontory near the cave where on clear days he can see the ramparts of the Hogwarts astronomy tower, a dark finger of stone above the trees.

Sirius will ask Dumbledore if Harry can come back here for the summer instead of going to the Dursleys. The protections surrounding Grimmauld Place are at least as strong as the blood enchantments Dumbledore has cast at Privet Drive, and Dumbledore owes Harry this; owes Sirius too. And as for the twelve weeks until then? For all his magic, Harry is vulnerable. Has been going off with men in parks, has been picking up strange wizards in pubs. Sirius can’t let him go back to Hogwarts so unprotected. So naked under his clothes, his skin so starved for love.

He brushes Harry’s hair back from his forehead and his eyes fall on the scar. On Harry’s smooth cheek above two day’s growth of beard. On his dark eyelashes, blinking sleepily up at him.

“I need to mark you,” Sirius says quietly.

“Mmmm.” Harry tilts his head back, offers his neck. The mark Sirius made yesterday has deepened to to a lovely mottled purple. Sirius traces it with his fingers.

“Not like that, though. Delightful as those marks are. I need to mark you magically. With a protective spell.”

“Like your tattoos?”

“Not exactly. May I do it?”

“You can do anything to me, Sirius,” Harry says, so earnestly that Sirius laughs.

“And that attitude, my Harry lad, is one of the reasons you need this spell. Roll over, then. On your stomach.”

Harry does, and Sirius kneels beside him, resting his hands a moment on Harry’s arse and shoulder. Feeling the warm flesh under his palms. Feeling the strength of his love for this person, whose body was made by two other people he loved so dearly, born of their flesh and blood. Here in the flesh, marked by blood. This person loving him, and something reborn in Sirius because of it. He will put his heart and soul and all of his magic into this. He would give everything he has to keep Harry safe, protected.

Sirius closes his eyes, seeing the image he is about to make, the image infused with his magic. There is nothing more personal, nothing more _himself_ , that he can mark Harry with than this.

He moves his lips to Harry’s right shoulder blade and begins sucking, feeling the skin heat up under the pressure of his mouth. When he takes his mouth away, a small fuchsia star has formed: Alludra.

Then he moves his lips to the center of Harry’s back, just to the right of his spine. Inside the suck of his mouth on Harry’s skin, another star bursts into being: Wesen. Sirius glides next to a spot above Harry’s left kidney. The star Adhara. Yes, the magic is there. He can feel it. With an intensity equal to the desperation he felt in Azkaban. To the wandless spells Sirius has only ever cast upon himself. But no stones this time, no soot, no death. Only the warmth of his mouth, wet and hot and sucking _in in in_ until Harry’s blood breaks free of its capillaries and unfurls, freed in a new bruise. On Harry’s left arse cheek, the star Mirzam.

“Stand up, now, my Harry.”

“You’re done?”

“No. I want you to see what I’ve done so far. Come with me.” Sirius holds him up. He cannot stop holding him. He walks Harry backward to the wardrobe and opens it, exposing the full-length mirror hanging on the inside of the door. “Look over your shoulder at your back,” he says.

Harry stares for a while at the pattern of marks across his back and buttocks: mouth-stars of fuchsia, purple, rose. Sirius watches Harry’s face in the mirror and sees the precise moment when comprehension dawns. A ripple across Harry’s forehead, his eyes growing suddenly bright. His mouth opening, his magic opening out all around him.

Harry turns from the mirror and takes Sirius’s hands. “It’s Canis Major,” he murmurs. “All down my back. Your constellation.”

Sirius nods. Map of celestial bodies, marked on the living body. Map of mouth marks, love marks. Sacred marks of flesh and blood.

Harry looks back to his reflection in the mirror. “But _your_ star isn’t there,” he says, frowning. “I’m sure it’s not.”

“Where should Sirius be, then?” Sirius asks, just a little wickedly.

Harry studies his back in the mirror another moment. Then his mouth falls open. “Fuck, Sirius. Your star is in—you’re going to mark my—my _hole_.”

A shiver of desire bursts through Sirius, from cock to tongue. He can already taste it. “You want that?” Sirius asks.

“You know I do.” Harry’s voice comes out husky. “That’s—fuck, Sirius, that’s—wow.”

“Tell me what it is, Harry.”

“It’s hot. It’s so dirty—and brilliant. I—I want you to mark me there. I want to be yours there. And everywhere, I—fuck, Sirius, it’s so much, I feel so much, it’s so good, you make me feel everything, and I—Christ, please do it to me.”

“Bend over for me, then. Right over the bed.”

Harry does, raising his arse in the air. “Should I...spread myself?”

“Just to start.”

Harry grips his arse cheeks and spreads them apart, opening himself. Sirius drops to his knees. It is a kind of worship, after all, the making of this spell. To keep Harry safe and whole. To claim him in his most secret and ecstatic place. As most precious. As _his_. And then all at once, Sirius is overwhelmed.

“Harry—oh, Harry. I need—” He closes his eyes. What _does_ he need, in order to finish the spell? What’s missing? He needs to make Harry understand the worship of this. To give him the gift of that as well. “I need to make love to you again,” he finishes.

In the Canis Major constellation, the star for which Sirius is named is located in the center of the dog’s chest, in the heart. Sirius’s heart is on his lips as he leans forward.

Kneeling between Harry’s spread legs, he kisses that sweet wrinkled bud, accepting it like the offering it is. Licking and tasting each delicate fold. Taking his time. Even with Harry arching back into him and moaning on the bed, Sirius goes slowly because this moment is fleeting, even as it is forever. It will only ever once be right now, this perfect meeting of their magic. Of belonging to each other while the whole world holds its breath and just _stops_ while Sirius does _this_.

“Hold my head, now Harry,” he murmurs. Harry steps wider and lets go of his arse cheeks, bringing his hands behind him. He threads his fingers through the dark curtains of Sirius’s hair, drawing the night through his hands. Pulling him closer. Sirius tongues his arsehole and Harry moans and shakes and holds.

He teases him, nipping his thighs, licking around the puckered edges, dipping just a little inside the opening. He slips in a finger and fucks him slow and gentle, all the while rimming the pinked edges. He makes love to him as deeply and worshipfully as he knows how, until Harry’s thrusting back against his mouth so hard it hurts Sirius’s neck, thrusting and rutting against the bed, torn between wanting Sirius to fuck deeper and wanting to rub his cock against the mattress. Sirius adds two fingers, reaching his other hand around Harry to fondle his balls.

“Oh, Sirius—fuck me hard now, please—”

He does it, thrusting straight in with his fingers now, his tongue all over the rim of Harry’s hole, bright and wet with spit and lube. Shaking, everything is shaking. The bed, Harry’s hands in Sirius’s hair, Harry’s legs, Sirius on his knees, fucking Harry until the moans become that keening, higher and higher, cries shaking the air, shaking Harry, breaking him open so the spell can enter.

“Tell me when you’re close,” Sirius grunts.

“Now—want to come— _mark_ me when I come—”

“ _Yes—_ ”

Sirius pulls his fingers out and moves his hand to Harry’s cock, making a loose fist for Harry to fuck into as he opens his mouth around Harry’s arsehole and presses his tongue inside. Sirius presses that plumsweet fruit to his mouth and sucks—the flesh, the dark plum skin. He sucks as Harry fucks his hand and the flesh of Harry’s opening swells hot and wet against Sirius’s lips, both of them swelling into one another as the new star is formed, the bright heart of the constellation. Harry comes with a cry that vibrates inside both of them and then the spell is finished. Sirius feels the magic seal itself around Harry, the star of Sirius shining in its center. He draws back, panting. The dark ring of Harry’s anus glistens, the tender folds sucked purple-pink. Sirius leans forward and, as gently as he can, kisses the star of his name.

“Sirius. Oh, Sirius.” Harry’s legs are still shaking.

“D’you feel it?”

Harry nods, a little wild-eyed. “I feel you in me. You’re there. You, I feel you.” Harry’s grinning and laughing and wrecked. “You’re in me, and you will be. You’ll stay with me, I feel it.”

Sirius climbs up on the bed, pulling Harry to him. “Stay with you always, Harry. Even while you’re gone from me.”

“I don’t want to go!”

“I’ll come visit you. In the cave, yeah?”

Harry nods, still trembling, and clutches Sirius’s arms.

“But even when I’m not there, Harry—you’ll feel me with you. I put it in the spell. I’ll be with you, and if you want to fuck someone else—”

“I don’t!”

Sirius holds up a hand to silence him. “But you might. And if you do, I’ll live with it. But when he’s fucking you, you’ll feel me there as well. You’ll never be alone, Harry. That’s what I’m giving you. I’ll be there, touching you and holding you. And when he fucks you, it’s me you’ll feel inside you. I’ll be there, and I’ll feel it. And I’ll know if you’re not playing safely, understand?”

“I only want to be with you, Sirius, always with you—”

“Understand?”

“But—”

“Keeping you safe is my job, Harry, remember? Now promise me.”

“I—I promise, but I don’t _want_ anyone else. I’ll never not want this, with you, you feel so good for me, I feel so _full,_ I—Oh.” Harry looks up. “Come inside me again.”

“Godric, do I love you,” Sirius murmurs.

Harry leans back on the duvet. “I’m—it’s not that I’m horny. I mean, yeah, I am, _still_ —” he laughs, shaking his messy head. “Which is kind of unbelievable, but it isn’t that. It’s—I don’t know how to say it, but I feel—the magic you did on me is still—fresh? It’s not settled, it’s all—it’s learning me, and I want—I want you to be inside me while it’s doing that.”

Sirius kisses his cheek. “I’ll say it again, Harry. You’re a fucking brilliant wizard. I have dittany salve in my room. You’ll need some to recover first, I think.”

“I don’t want dittany. I just—I _want_ to feel you, all right? While I’m sore. I like that sometimes.”

Sirius kisses him again. “So I’ve seen. All right, then. Here. Lie here beside me. On our sides, like this. My chest against your back, against all the stars I just made. Slide your leg up. Let me hold you against me while I fuck you one last time.”

“A thousand more times, a million.”

“Yes, my Harry. But not before you go back to school.”

“Don’t even say it—it’s horrible there now. Umbri—” he breaks off, shaking his head. “Let’s not talk about it at all. I just want to be here. While I can.”

“Right here.” Sirius kisses the back of his neck, then scoots down on the bed a little, lining up. “You cast the spell this time, Harry. Take hold of my cock. I’m already hard for you again.”

Harry reaches behind himself and wraps his hand around Sirius, just under the head. Sirius lets out a sigh of pleasure as Harry takes a breath, concentrating. “ _Lubrico_ ,” Harry whispers, and Sirius feels Harry’s hand around him flood slick and warm.

“Very good. Now inside yourself, _Lubrico intimum_.”

 _“Lubrico intimum,”_ Harry repeats. He gives a yelp of delight. “I did it! I feel it!”

“A little trick you can show off to all your friends.”

“Prat.” Harry spanks Sirius’s cock against himself. Now fuck me, Professor.”

“Protection spell first, please. _Protego lues_.”

 _“Protego lues_ —ow. Oh. That one needs a little work.”

“I know someone you can practice with.”

“Will you—you _will_ come visit me soon, right? In the cave.”

“I promise.”

Slowly then, because Harry really is swollen from the final star. Slowly, to give the spell a chance to settle. And because Sirius does not ever want to let him go. He makes love to Harry more slowly than he’s ever done anything in his life, feeling every cell of Harry’s skin where he touches, breathing in every one of Harry’s breaths and shudders. And so gently. As he holds Harry in his arms, he feels the spell knit in: the map of Sirius’s true home, a place he’d make where Harry would be safe from every darkness. As he holds him, he feels the moon on his chest rise bright among the stars.

~

Later, he watches from the front window as Harry steps up onto the platform of the Knight Bus, watches as he’s swallowed by the hulk of metal that becomes a blur as the bus disappears. Sirius stumbles, bracing himself against the window frame as Azkaban comes down around him. But because he’s still inside the field of Harry’s love and magic, Sirius is able to prevent himself from fully falling. He grips the dirty windowsill and rests his head against the pane. But as he breathes, as he raises his head, he can smell that the protection of Harry’s scent on him is already beginning to dissipate.

He’ll transform into Padfoot, then. It’s the only way this will be bearable. And Padfoot’s nose is keener, so he’ll be able to scent Harry on himself just that much longer.

He’ll transform now.

But no, not quite yet. First he needs to stand here, very still. With one hand pressed to his cock, soft inside his trousers, and the other hand pressed to his chest, laid over the moon that Harry turned around. He needs to stay human a moment longer so he can touch these places and remember with his human mind how, when he came inside Harry for the last time, he felt himself to be not a star, but a meteor. The kind that streaks gold across the night, flaring so brightly that anyone who sees it can’t help but utter that soft, involuntary cry—

_Oh—_

Then watch in wonder as it falls.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! If you liked this fic, please comment and rec--feedback keeps me going.


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